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Friday, August 4, 2017

Bulwer-Lytton Awards: Crime/Detective Category

I love the Bulwer-Lytton Awards. They're always such fun, especially for readers. Following: The Winner and Runners-up in the Crime/Detective Category.Conceived to honor the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl
Bulwer-Lytton and to encourage unpublished authors who do not have the
time to actually write entire books, the contest challenges entrants to
compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Bulwer was selected
as patron of the competition because he opened his novel "Paul Clifford"
(1830) with the immortal words, "It was a dark and stormy night."
Lytton’s sentence actually parodied the line and went on to make a real
sentence of it, but he did originate the line "The pen is mightier than
the sword," and the expression "the great unwashed." His best known
work, one on the book shelves of many of our great-grandparents, is The
Last Days of Pompeii (1834), an historical novel that has been adapted
for film multiple times.

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford(1830)

2017 Winner, Crime/Detective***

Detective Sam Steel stood at the crime scene
staring puzzled at the chalk outline of Ms. Mulgrave's body which was
really just a stick figure with a dress, curly hair, boobs, and a smiley
face because the police chalk guy had the day off. — Doug Self, Brunswick, Maine

Dishonorable Mentions, Crime/Detective:

She walked into my office and brayed, “I want you to put a tail on my husband.”— Steve Lynch, Tuscon, Arizona

“Not cucumber sandwiches again,” Earl “The
Embezzler” DeWitt’s thoughts turned dark as he trudged through the chow
line at Hummingbird State Correctional Institute, lamenting his culinary
fate for the thousandth time and dreaming of the greasy sloppy joe he
might be enjoying instead, if he’d only committed a manly felony, like
murder, and ended up at Riker’s instead of this ersatz country club for
white-collar wimps. — Maureen Donohue, Paso Robles, California

The church was deathly quiet: suddenly a shot
rang out, a woman screamed, and somewhere in the back, a baby cried
because that baby hadn't been taken to the nursery, even though the sign
on the door clearly states that babies should be taken to the nursery.— Mark Schweizer, Tryon, North Carolina

As hard-boiled detective Max Baxter ate his
soft-boiled egg, he thought about the gorgeous dame he'd found last
night lying in a pool of her own blood—it being inconvenient to lie in a
pool of someone else's blood—and wondered how she liked her eggs.— Pam Tallman, Huntington Beach, California

Detective Robertson knew he had Joyce Winters
dead to rights for the murder—at the crime scene he had found Winters’
fingerprints, shell casings matching the gun registered to her, and,
most damning of all, a Starbucks cup with the name “Josie” scrawled on
it.— Doug Purdy, Roseville, California

Nobody messed with Rocky “The Anvil' Roselli,
the toughest, badass mob enforcer that ever walked the mean streets of
downtown LA, but for some time now he had been considering an
alternative career in interior design, a secret kept well hidden from
his felonious contemporaries; like a strawberry jam sandwich lying
buried at the bottom of a sack of brussels sprouts.— Ted Downes, Cardiff, Wales

“It’s a classic,” she muttered, as she
flicked the hair from the old fur coat purchased from eBay for
sixty-eight dollars plus overnight shipping for the purpose of this very
moment when she stuck out her hip, pulled the trigger, and shot him in
that stupid face of his.— Beth Armogida, Sierra Madre, California

So many questions raced through the heiress's
mind: Who had killed the maid and which guests were lying to her and
who the hell was going to clean up all this goddamned blood because it
sure as hell wasn't going to be her, she could tell you that much.— Samantha Bates, Columbia, Tennessee

The horizontal array of rectangular golden
sunshafts that filtered through my shutters was interrupted by a
statuesque silhouette appearing at my office door, her widow’s pillbox
with netted veil only slightly obscuring her opalescent eyes, her
alabaster décolletage accented by a sizeable amethyst pendant, and a
silky floor-length ebony gown that revealed a muffin-top that clearly
lacked of any kind of abdominal exercise regimen.— Peter S. Bjorkman, Rocklin, California

Captain Duke Ellsworth of the Poughkeepsie
Police Department wondered,
as he stood in the brightly lit room and
stared at the gun lying on the floor, if its barrel were still warm, and
what his wife was making for
dinner that evening, which he would no doubt
have to eat cold when he finally finished up here, especially if he
paid his mistress in Fishkill a visit on the way home.— Rich Zaleski, Stevenson, Connecticut

2 comments:

Are there similar prizes for, or at least compilations of, best real opening sentences? My favorite is still "Sixty seconds before the baby shot its father, leaves fell lazily in Central Park", from Samuel Fuller's "Brainquake".